The Sea at the Bottom of This Page

You probably came here from the “how?” next to the record at the bottom of the page. This is what that sea is.

It’s an oil painting that nobody held a brush for. I drew a simple scene, a small program painted it stroke by stroke (curved strokes, bristles, a bit of impasto, linen underneath), and on the page only the water moves, band by band.

A few things live in it:

• The ferry is an Istanbul vapur. It crosses the horizon now and then, and while I’m listening to something it puffs music notes instead of smoke.
• The record floating on the water is what I’m playing on Spotify right now, or the last thing I played. Tap it for the whole record player. How that got wired up is its own story.
• The sky is real. It’s the weather over Sosnowiec, where I live, right now. By day it’s clear, cloudy, rainy or snowing. At night the moon is in its actual phase, and its road of light on the water grows as it fills, unless clouds or rain hide it. Switch the theme up top to see the other half.

That’s fourteen paintings, one for each sky, and the page picks one. The weather comes from Open-Meteo, a free weather API that doesn’t even ask for a key, which I appreciate. The moon doesn’t need an API at all. It’s a bit of arithmetic: days since a known new moon, divided by 29.53.

So if it’s raining in Sosnowiec, it’s raining on the Aegean down there too. Come back when it snows.

Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, CC BY 4.0.